It’s a melancholy exercise to muse on how different our situation might be today if more of our national leaders — lawmakers and jurists — took to heart Justice Holmes’ famous admonition that the life of the law is experience.

If, for example, a majority of the Supreme Court justices had taken their towering predecessor’s insight into account, they would have weighed what we know about the corrupting influence of money on our politics and we would have been spared the malevolent repercussions of the Citizens United decision. Because they did not, we now confront a situation in which the ideologically motivated wealthy are able to exercise an intolerably outsized role in our politics — often in secret — creating an imbalance that makes the country increasing unstable.

Because our lawmakers refuse to learn from the experience of the Washington Naval Yard, Newtown, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Columbine and all the rest of our recurrent massacres, we remain unable to enact reasonable firearms regulations, or to agree on how we might respond to evidence of mental illness in the proactive and humane way that would short-circuit tragic mayhem.

Since an increasing number of conservative lawmakers insist that history simply can be ignored, the self-evident role of Social Security and Medicare in virtually eliminating statistically significant old-age poverty is dismissed in favor of ideologically driven “reform,” which is a euphemism for cuts. Now the congressional right has turned its sights on the food stamp program that has kept millions of the working poor, children and — increasingly these days — unemployed veterans from hunger. If the House majority has its way, the program, despite its record of success, essentially will be gutted. Nearly 4 million would be dropped from the rolls next year and as many as 850,000 will have their benefits cut. By 2015, the program’s funding will have shrunk by 12 percent at a time when unemployment remains high, underemployment is spreading and wages are falling.

Then there is the issue of comprehensive immigration reform, which is desperately needed for a host of human and economic reasons and whose prospects of passage seem to recede with each passing month. President George W. Bush tried to accomplish it and failed, undermined by the ideologues in his own party. President Barack Obama has once again put it among his legislative priorities, but congressional intransigence and, particularly, opposition to a pathway to citizenship appear to make it a dead letter.

Once again, abstraction trumps experience. Consider the difference, for example, between the tenor of the debate over immigration in Washington and California, where the human, economic and political realities of immigration — both legal and unauthorized — have been taken to heart by lawmakers and voters alike. The state Legislature’s recent passage of a bill allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain a driver’s license is a case in point. The sobriety and practicality of the debate over the measure is a model that Washington might take to heart, if ideology gives way to realism. California, in fact, is becoming a model of immigration reform from the bottom up.

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The driver’s license bill and other measures like it build, in turn, on Los Angeles’ long and successful experience with local measures like the LAPD’s Special Order 40 — in force since 1979 and initiated by a conservative chief, Daryl Gates — which directs officers not to stop anyone purely to question their immigration status or to inquire about it when taking a police report. The result was that hundreds of thousands of recent immigrants were brought out of the legal shadows and public safety increased for everyone. The new licensing regulations will do much the same on a statewide basis.

California’s path to immigration realism is a product, in large part, of simple human experience. We know more about the issues involved in immigration because we see them firsthand in our lives. Most of us have a friend, a co-worker or an employee who is a newcomer and many of them or their family members are here without papers. As a recent study by USC’s Center for Immigration Studies found, our state is home to 2.6 million of America’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants. That’s 7 percent of all California residents, or more than one in four of all the immigrants who today comprise fully 27 percent of the state’s population.

About 10 percent of Los Angeles County’s population is undocumented. One out of every five of our children — most of them citizens — have at least one parent without legal documentation. Statewide, 16 percent of children have an undocumented parent. In the Inland Empire 8 percent of the adults are undocumented immigrants, and 14 percent of all children have a parent without papers. Nearly half of the undocumented adults have been in this country for more than a decade and among those who head a household, 17 percent are established enough to have become homeowners.

Because Californians live with the human implications of undocumented immigration and understand the critical role these newcomers play in our economic life, more than six out of every 10 voters here favor the federal path to citizenship so many congressional lawmakers find so abhorrent.

That famous remark of Justice Holmes’ comes from a landmark lecture on the common law that he gave in 1881. His experience of the Civil War, in which ideological obsession and the willful defiance of history and experience produced such unspeakable tragedy and pain, was still weighing heavily on his mind, when he said: “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. In order to know what it is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become. We must alternately consult history and existing theories of legislation. But the most difficult labor will be to understand the combination of the two into new products at every stage.”

And so it remains still.

Tim Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles News Group. ruttencolumn@gmail.com.